We are delighted to announce that OKTOPUS can now import Smart Notebook files directly – as requested by many of our users who are now using OKTOPUS after moving away from Notebook.

We have also added in the ability to choose your own collaboration ports (that one is for the network admins), we’ve got even more backgrounds to choose from, and we’ve implemented a brand new design for our webcam feed tool!

We’ve also made some performance improvements, tidied up our highlighter UI, fixed some undo/redo functionality, and a whole lot more. The change log has all the info.

As soon as we had implemented IWB import support, we continued to get requests for direct import of Smart Notebook files from our user community.

We are happy to say that we are now working on adding in this functionality to our software! We understand that a lot of schools are moving away from Smart Notebook for various reasons, and are now using OKTOPUS as a direct replacement, so we want to ensure that the transition goes as smoothly as possible.

Our next release will import Smart Notebook files to the same level as our IWB import support, which includes annotations, shapes, lines, images, and text.

In this release we’ve implemented lots more background options including lined paper, graphing paper, and some new colours.

We’ve also added a buzzer sound to our countdown timer, improved scrolling through the sidebar, and made the handwriting recognition available in every tool category. Check out the change log for all the updates.

OKTOPUS will now use Microsoft’s handwriting capabilities (if installed on your system) for the currently selected language within OKTOPUS. Previously, OKTOPUS may have been using your system default language, which may not have been correct. This was a sticking point for our global user community. Thanks for the feedback!

We’ve made improvements when dealing with locked objects, importing audio is faster, and the selection box can deselect when dragging the opposite way.

We’ve also fixed a few bugs with the audio tool and fixed some layering issues too.

Primarily for our global users outside of English-speaking countries, getting handwriting recognition to work using Microsoft Windows’ built-in recogniser doesn’t always work out of the box.

So, we’re going to make this easier by improving our process. Right now we’re auto-detecting the language you’re using in Windows and trying to match that in OKTOPUS. Often, this isn’t working as expected for some users who have multiple languages installed on their system.

Going forward, we’re going to use the same handwriting engine within Windows to match the currently selected language in OKTOPUS. So if you are using OKTOPUS in French, we will attempt to use the French handwriting recognition engine. This means you will have to ensure that the handwriting pack is installed for the language you want to use OKTOPUS in. For the majority of our users with this feedback, that’s not a problem.

And if the language pack doesn’t exist, we’ll use to your system’s default handwriting recognition engine!

We’re really excited to tell you that we’ve implemented our new clear screen options and our new textbox controls. (See the change log for links later in this post). We’ve also sorted out some IWB import issues with commas and other special characters, and fixed several bugs.